Review: 'To Die in Mexico'

Author names names; it's not who we thought.

Updated 9:09 am, Sunday, June 26, 2011

After three years of incomprehensibly bloody mayhem in Mexico, it has become almost humanly impossible to comprehend a conflict that has already claimed 35,000 lives and shows no signs of abating.

Triggered by President Felipe Calderón's attempt, beginning in 2006, to bring the Mexican cartels to heel, the mayhem is regularly described in the American press as a “drug war,” in which the competing cartels are also at each other's throats.

However, that weary term has long been inadequate. What is happening just south of the Rio Grande more closely resembles a runaway criminal insurrection, where heavily armed gangsters control much of the country and terms like justice, law and order are meaningless.

Most Popular

In researching his book, “To Die in Mexico,” reporter John Gibler went to some of the hot spots of the conflict, including Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Culiacán, in an attempt to make sense of it.

While not everyone will buy his conclusions, few could argue with the authority of his ground-level reporting, as he seeks out Mexican reporters, public officials, human rights activists and others directly affected by the violence.

In the end, he points the accusing finger for the ongoing catastrophe not at the paramilitary Zetas or La Familia, not at El Chapo Guzman or El Mayo, but at the government of the United States and, secondarily, the leaders of Mexico.

The epidemic of violence in Mexico, Gibler — author of “Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt” — asserts, is the bitter fruit of decades of self-serving U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, and also of entirely misguided domestic drug enforcement policies.

“Reagan's drug war was an overwhelming tragedy; Calderon's is a farce,” he writes. “The tragedy of mass incarceration, community degradation, and decades of brutality and murder at the hands of U.S.-supported counterinsurgencies and military dictatorships throughout the hemisphere is now being repeated as the farce of senseless murder, a so-called ‘narco insurgency' south of the border.”

Even legalization of drugs, which Gibler argues is a logical first step to reducing illegal profits and taming the cartels, will not remedy the larger political and economic problems that have made Mexico a dysfunctional state.

“Bringing pot and cocaine into the legal market economy's open arms will stop the gangland murders, but leave Mexico, for example, to the good old days of living under a bloody authoritarian regime that bows to U.S. economic bullying, concentrates wealth in a tiny fraction of the population, while sinking the majority in destitution and misery,” he writes.

The most compelling parts of Gibler's book are his reporting on the near hopeless state of Mexican journalism. Aggressive reporters in the conflict zones risk beatings or death, causing many to choose self-censorship and thus join the culture of silence.

Particularly compelling is the story of two Mileno reporters who last year were kidnapped and beaten by mobsters in Reynosa, and then inexplicably allowed to live.

“Drug war silence is not the sheer absence of talking, but rather, the practice of not saying anything. You may talk as much as you like, as long as you avoid facts. Newspaper headlines announce the daily death toll, but the articles will not tell you anything about who the dead were, who might have killed them or why,” he writes.

And part of the reason the real story cannot be told, he said, is that it contradicts the official party line in which the good guys, both American and Mexican, are battling to save the world from dangerous drugs.

“This is what you cannot say: ‘The Mexican Army and federal police have administered drug trafficking for decades. Drug money fills the vaults of Mexico's banks, enters the economy at every level, and, with traffickers' annual profits estimated at between $30 billion and $60 billion a year, rivals oil as the largest single source of cash revenue in the country,'” he writes.

While these might be difficult pills to swallow, few will dispute the authority of Gibler's reporting or the force of his reasoning. For anyone still trying to make sense of it all, “To Die in Mexico,” is a good place to begin.